Previous research indicates that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds show deficits in aspects of attention, including a reduced ability to filter irrelevant information and to suppress prepotent responses. However, less is known about the neural mechanisms of group differences in attention, which could reveal the stages of processing at…

Twenty-two- and 27-month-old children were tested for their understanding of pretending as a specific intentional action form. Pairs of superficially similar behaviors--pretending to perform an action and trying to perform that action--were demonstrated to children. The 27-month-olds, and to some degree the 22-month-olds, showed in their responses…

This paper investigates the ability of infants to attend to continuous stimulus variables and how this capacity relates to the representation of number. We examined the change in area needed by 6-month-old infants to detect a difference in the size of a single element (Elmo face). Infants successfully discriminated a 1:4, 1:3 and 1:2 change in the…

Infant bilingualism offers a unique opportunity to study the relative effects of language experience and maturation on brain development, with each child serving as his or her own control. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to words were examined in 19- to 22-month-old English-Spanish bilingual toddlers. The children's dominant vs. nondominant…

An important source of information about a new word's meaning (and its associated lexical class) is its range of reference: the number of objects to which it is extended. Ninety toddlers (mean age = 37 months) participated in a study to determine whether young children can use this information in word learning. When a novel word was presented with…

Most 4-year-olds can predict the behavior of a person who wants an object but is mistaken about its location. More difficult is predicting behavior when the person is mistaken about location and wants to avoid the object. We tested between two explanations for children's difficulties with avoidance false belief: the Selection Processing model of…

In Study 1, 54 3-, 6- and 9-month-old infants interacted with an adult stranger who engaged in a face-to-face (dyadic) exchange. Dyadic interaction was halted when the adult turned away to look at an object. In a Joint Attention condition, the adult alternated visual attention between the infant and the object, and in a Look Away condition she…

Recent research examining infants' understanding of intentional action claims to be studying the early origins or precursors of children's later theories of mind. If these infant understandings are continuous with later preschool achievements, there should be empirical connections between the two. We provide initial evidence that infants' social…

The current study distinguishes between attributions of goal-directed perception (i.e. attention) and non-goal-directed perception to examine 9-month-olds' interpretation of others' head and eye turns. In a looking time task, 9-month-olds encoded the relationship between an actor's head and eye turns and a target object if the head and eye turns…

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to…

Three experiments examined children's knowledge of harmony in Western music. The children heard a series of chords followed by a final, target chord. In Experiment 1, French 6- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was sung with the vowel /i/ or /u/. In Experiment 2, Australian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was played on a…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

Adults readily detect changes in face patterns brought about by the inversion of eyes and mouth when the faces are viewed upright but not when they are viewed upside down. Research suggests that this illusion (the Thatcher illusion) is caused by the interfering effects of face inversion on the processing of second-order relational information…

Maturation of fetal response to music was characterized over the last trimester of pregnancy using a 5-minute piano recording of Brahms' Lullaby, played at an average of 95, 100, 105 or 110 dB (A). Within 30 seconds of the onset of the music, the youngest fetuses (28-32 weeks GA) showed a heart rate increase limited to the two highest dB levels;…

A preference to novelty paradigm used to study human infants (Quinn, 2002) examined attention to novel animal pictures at subordinate, basic and superordinate levels in tamarins. First, pairs of pictures were presented in phases, starting with a monkey species (subordinate level) and ending with mammal and dinosaur sets (superordinate levels).…